We’re headed for a more educated world.

Question: What is your outlook?

Dan Glickman: Well I don’t think you can be pessimistic, but I think that there are some pessimistic trends that I don’t like. And one of them is the lack of resiliency in our political system. That does worry me a lot. And if we continue down that road we will not have the best and brightest going into politics, and that’s harmful for America. On the other hand I think we’re gonna have a more educated world than we did before. I think the Internet offers great possibilities for democratizing education. We get more people learning more things. So you have to be optimistic. I mean I think we have some serious challenges from the global environment to wage and income equality which exist, to disease – various diseases – and energy, and other kinds of things. I’m not sure there’s anything that can’t be dealt with if our political systems are resilient enough to deal with them.

Recorded on: 7/6/07